#seth.

[jin-leizu]

"And what time do you call this?" Seth can't win; not with Leizu. He arrives when summoned? Should have been early. Arrives early? He's disrespecting her time; she might still have been busy. And arriving late? Well, it goes without saying. Nonetheless, she continues to make infrequent... invitations to him. She has found that he is more pliant than many might think: not a terrible outlet for Leizu's frustrations. @all-cf-me

[sable-hart]

@all-cf-me She could have started her building inspections anywhere, really. So if someone wants to ask why she's checking out the stability of the foundations of the Bearded Lady first, she'd just explain it away as random selection.

Being there does come with it's risks, though, and Sable is on her knees in the dirt with a tool stuck in the earth near the building's foundation when the risk manifests. "Hi, Seth," she says through gritted teeth. So typical that he'd come across her while she's in a vulnerable position; she'll be damned if she stands up, though, and gives him the satisfaction of seeing her scramble. "I'll be out of your hair soon. Just doing some routine checks after the flare."

[milesworld96]

If Cody and Seth win tonight imma cry, they CANNOT win tonight

Absolutely not

[seraphiimx]

where. somewhere over a rainbow perhaps who. @sethlozano

"So... I see you've gone through a little upgrade," it was more statement than question, for Ángel could sense the difference in the other. Even well hidden, there had been no denying that Seth was no longer simply a vampire. "Were you tired of being so short and so young? Had to get a one up on the rest of us?"

[livndie4luv13]

seth. seth stop. seth i can’t do this. seth.

[rosenkranz-does-things]

happy severance day! here's some studies I've done while waiting for the new episode

[boasamishipper]

actually the reveal that there was no timeskip at all is hysterical. milchick really spent that whole weekend going all over town firing people, hiring people, putting together insane fruit baskets, and serving cunt in his motorcycle helmet. then at the orders of the board he had to very quickly fire the people he hired, rehire the people he fired, commission an oil painting for the severed floor lobby, redecorate the break room, and put together an award-winning claymation corporate apology video designed to showcase the new innie perks and reforms that don't exist as well as that one time helena eagan's innie sucked face with the innie whose outie his ex-boss is obsessed with. where is HIS waffle party

[mercy-grigoryan]

The debauchery of the festival has stayed, sticky, in her mind, like walking across treacle. It's why she comes to be at the Bearded Lady: curiosity. An inability to put such things out of her thoughts. But it's so dirty, here. Table tops ringed with the sticky condensation of alcohol, shoes gummed to the floor with spills, strange viscid substances on unwashed skin... Mercy barely makes it across the threshold and her legs go weak, vision blurring. But when she collapses, she finds she has collapsed into someone's arms -- or perhaps he caught her? She isn't sure. "Oh -- thank you--" she murmurs, fingers grasping at the stranger's arms. Her head is spinning too much for her to let go. @all-cf-me

[ulyuxe]

In the past fifty years, fantasy’s greatest sin might be its creation of a bland, invariant, faux-Medieval European backdrop. The problem isn’t that every fantasy novel is set in the same place: pick a given book, and it probably deviates somehow. The problem is that the texture of this place gets everywhere.

What’s texture, specifically? Exactly what Elliot says: material culture. Social space. The textiles people use, the jobs they perform, the crops they harvest, the seasons they expect, even the way they construct their names. Fantasy writing doesn’t usually care much about these details, because it doesn’t usually care much about the little people – laborers, full-time mothers, sharecroppers, so on. (The last two books of Earthsea represent LeGuin’s remarkable attack on this tendency in her own writing.) So the fantasy writer defaults – fills in the tough details with the easiest available solution, and moves back to the world-saving, vengeance-seeking, intrigue-knotting narrative. Availability heuristics kick in, and we get another world of feudal serfs hunting deer and eating grains, of Western name constructions and Western social assumptions. (Husband and wife is not the universal historical norm for family structure, for instance.)

Defaulting is the root of a great many evils. Defaulting happens when we don’t think too much about something we write – a character description, a gender dynamic, a textile on display, the weave of the rug. Absent much thought, automaticity, the brain’s subsconscious autopilot, invokes the easiest available prototype – in the case of a gender dynamic, dad will read the paper, and mom will cut the protagonist’s hair. Or, in the case of worldbuilding, we default to the bland fantasy backdrop we know, and thereby reinforce it. It’s not done out of malice, but it’s still done.

The only way to fight this is by thinking about the little stuff. So: I was quite wrong. You do need to worldbuild pretty hard. Worldbuild against the grain, and worldbuild to challenge. Think about the little stuff. You don’t need to position every rain shadow and align every tectonic plate before you start your short story. But you do need to build a base of historical information that disrupts and overturns your implicit assumptions about how societies ‘ordinarily’ work, what they ‘ordinarily’ eat, who they ‘ordinarily’ sleep with. Remember that your slice of life experience is deeply atypical and selective, filtered through a particular culture with particular norms. If you stick to your easy automatic tendencies, you’ll produce sexist, racist writing – because our culture still has sexist, racist tendencies, tendencies we internalize, tendencies we can now even measure and quantify in a laboratory. And you’ll produce narrow writing, writing that generalizes a particular historical moment, its flavors and tongues, to a fantasy world that should be much broader and more varied. Don’t assume that the world you see around you, its structures and systems, is inevitable.

We... need worldbuilding by Seth Dickinson

[welcometomeloxia]

[consultingfujoshi]

the cunt off to end all cunt offs are you actually kidding me people fucking died this shit was felt thousands of miles away through tremors in the earth the sheer cosmic power of their facecards rippled through the ether and kier goddamn eagans ghost on the big waffle in the sky shivered and turned around like Something Just Happened

[handcrushedbyamalletremix]

nothing is certain about severance except mr milchick having that shit ON

[saryasy]

#real tv is back

Bonus:

[hawberries]

Seth Lowell and the bad bitch he pulled by being autistic

[watfords]

milchick telling the refiners that the waterfall at woe’s hollow is the tallest in the world

[profiad]

Welcome back… been a minute.